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Related papers: Competitive Policy Optimization

200 papers

Proficient game agents with diverse play styles enrich the gaming experience and enhance the replay value of games. However, recent advancements in game AI based on reinforcement learning have predominantly focused on improving proficiency,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Lingfeng Li , Yunlong Lu , Yongyi Wang , Wenxin Li

We revisit the domain of off-policy policy optimization in RL from the perspective of coordinate ascent. One commonly-used approach is to leverage the off-policy policy gradient to optimize a surrogate objective -- the total discounted in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Hsin-En Su , Yen-Ju Chen , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu

Policy-based methods with function approximation are widely used for solving two-player zero-sum games with large state and/or action spaces. However, it remains elusive how to obtain optimization and statistical guarantees for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Yulai Zhao , Yuandong Tian , Jason D. Lee , Simon S. Du

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

We introduce Team Utility-Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization (TUC-PPO), a new deep reinforcement learning framework. It extends Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) by integrating team welfare objectives specifically for spatial public…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Zhaoqilin Yang , Xin Wang , Ruichen Zhang , Chanchan Li , Youliang Tian

Existing policy-gradient methods for auto-regressive language models typically select subsequent tokens one at a time as actions in the policy. While effective for many generation tasks, such an approach may not fully capture the structure…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Mufan Xu , Kehai Chen , Xuefeng Bai , Zhengyu Niu , Muyun Yang , Tiejun Zhao , Min Zhang

We study the problem of off-policy policy optimization in Markov decision processes, and develop a novel off-policy policy gradient method. Prior off-policy policy gradient approaches have generally ignored the mismatch between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

Recent years have witnessed a tremendous improvement of deep reinforcement learning. However, a challenging problem is that an agent may suffer from inefficient exploration, particularly for on-policy methods. Previous exploration methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Engagement-optimized adaptive tutoring systems may prioritize short-term behavioral signals over sustained learning outcomes, creating structural incentives for reward hacking in reinforcement learning policies. We formalize this challenge…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Oluseyi Olukola , Nick Rahimi

Binary optimization has a wide range of applications in combinatorial optimization problems such as MaxCut, MIMO detection, and MaxSAT. However, these problems are typically NP-hard due to the binary constraints. We develop a novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-04 Cheng Chen , Ruitao Chen , Tianyou Li , Ruichen Ao , Zaiwen Wen

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular deep policy gradient algorithm. In standard implementations, PPO regularizes policy updates with clipped probability ratios, and parameterizes policies with either continuous Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Chloe Ching-Yun Hsu , Celestine Mendler-Dünner , Moritz Hardt

Approaches to policy optimization have been motivated from diverse principles, based on how the parametric model is interpreted (e.g. value versus policy representation) or how the learning objective is formulated, yet they share a common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ramki Gummadi , Saurabh Kumar , Junfeng Wen , Dale Schuurmans

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Traditional approaches to portfolio optimization, often rooted in Modern Portfolio Theory and solved via quadratic programming or evolutionary algorithms, struggle with scalability or flexibility, especially in scenarios involving complex…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Christian Oliva , Pedro R. Ventura , Luis F. Lago-Fernández

Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 David M. Bossens , Atsushi Nitanda

Traditional policy gradient methods are fundamentally flawed. Natural gradients converge quicker and better, forming the foundation of contemporary Reinforcement Learning such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 W. J. A. van Heeswijk

Markov Decision Processes are classically solved using Value Iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms. Recent interest in Reinforcement Learning has motivated the study of methods inspired by optimization, such as gradient ascent. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Sajad Khodadadian , Prakirt Raj Jhunjhunwala , Sushil Mahavir Varma , Siva Theja Maguluri

Instability and slowness are two main problems in deep reinforcement learning. Even if proximal policy optimization (PPO) is the state of the art, it still suffers from these two problems. We introduce an improved algorithm based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Zhenyu Zhang , Xiangfeng Luo , Tong Liu , Shaorong Xie , Jianshu Wang , Wei Wang , Yang Li , Yan Peng

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Xiaoyang Tan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing